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Belief: Empowerment or Placebo

Will believing in something make it effective? Bring it into existence? Empower it?

Will forgetting something cause it to fail, fade, disappear?

When scientists talk about double-blind studies, they are essentially trying to mitigate the placebo effect. The placebo effect is: A placebo is anything that seems to be a “real” medical treatment — but isn’t. It could be a pill, a shot, or some other type of “fake” treatment. What all placebos have in common is that they do not contain an active substance meant to affect health.

If the world is actually a construct of energy effects held together by belief, then anything we believe in strongly enough can be manifested. This is sometimes used to explain the existence and disappearance of gods and goddesses because their followers peaked and guttered. A pop culture example of this is the Ghostbuster movie series. A more philosophical example is the move What Dreams May Come starring Robin Williams. This is trivialized by “think positive” and “right living.” It is criminalized by jihad, fascism and fundamentalism.

Today, belief has become synonymous with truth. We have “alternative facts” and “fake news.” We have propaganda and divisiveness. We have tribalism and hate. What we all have to remember is that, as poet and activist Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you.”

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“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” ― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.” – Simone de Beauvoir

“Naive as it may sound, inoculating society against the antisocial requires, at bottom, persuading people of what is palpably true: that society has value and everyone should contribute.” – Bruce Cannon Gibney, Author